Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services

Gold Award:

Veeam Software Backup & Replication 5.0

Virtual server backup has been one of the hottest topics in the data storage space in 2010. Backing up virtual machines is still a pain point for IT pros, and vendors are doing what they can to ease that discomfort. In the backup and disaster recovery (DR) software and services category this year, a virtualization-specific backup app stood out. Veeam Software's Backup & Replication 5.0 addressed some major issues that users have struggled with and garnered its share of praise from our judges.

Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 is an image-based backup tool that takes snapshots of VMware virtual machines (VMs), and backs up only changed blocks. Backup data is also compressed and deduplicated. Version 5.0 offers the ability to run VMs from a compressed and deduplicated backup file, which eliminates the need to extract a backup and copy it to production storage. This allows for a number of new features.

First, Instant VM Recovery lets users boot VM images directly from compressed backup repositories so a user can work immediately during a restore instead of having to uncompress the backup data, convert it to a virtual machine disk (VMDK) file and replicate the data back to the production storage. This innovation speeds recovery time considerably and streamlines the recovery process. Backup & Replication 5.0 also offers Instant File-Level Recovery for file system restores.

SureBackup Recovery Verification is another new utility in Version 5.0. SureBackup automatically verifies the ability to recover every backup of all VMs and automates what traditionally has been a manual process. SureBackup also automates testing so users can be confident they can restore specific files or apps. Universal Application-Item Recovery allows recovery from any virtualized application on any operating system with no additional backups, agents or software tools. Finally, the On-Demand Sandbox creates test virtual machines to troubleshoot problems, workarounds, software patches and application code.

Our judges were impressed. "Veeam seems to constantly be leading the pack when it comes to innovation in the virtualization backup space," one said, while another noted Backup & Replication 5.0 "offers unique functionality that solves serious operational VMware problems."

Pricing starts at $599 per socket for the standard edition and $899 for the enterprise edition.